Media and Publishing: Year In Review 2005

Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content. Learn more.

This article was originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year, an annual print publication that
provides an overview of the year’s most-notable people and events.
Unlike most articles on Britannica.com, Book of the Year articles are not reviewed and revised after their initial publication.
Rather, they are presented on the site as archival content, intended for historical reference only.

American TV broadcasters coped with the departure of four longtime news anchors, and “podcasting” spread quickly; in the publishing realm, newspapers continued to struggle to attract readers, Vanity Fair magazine disclosed the identity of Deep Throat, and the latest book in the Harry Potter series sold millions of copies.

Organization

Rupert Murdoch, who bought Internet companies IGN Entertainment, MySpace.com, and Scout Media, was reelected chairman of the News Corp. in 2005 despite a shareholders’ revolt. Murdoch’s son Lachlan unexpectedly resigned from his executive post at News Corp. in August. Lachlan’s brother, James, remained chief executive of BSkyB, which acquired EasyNet in order to be able to offer Internet access, pay TV, and telephony. British terrestrial broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 each acquired a 20% stake in Freeview, a digital free-to-air TV service launched in 2002.

The British Broadcasting Corporation was hit on May 23 with a 24-hour strike in which 11,000 of 28,000 BBC journalists and technicians protested 4,000 job cuts. On August 15 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation locked out 5,500 workers. Seven weeks later, after protests from unions in London, Jerusalem, and the U.S., the dispute was resolved when CBC backed down from its plan to hire more contractual workers.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Spanish-language production company TV Azteca and its chairman, Ricardo B. Salinas Pliego, with not having properly disclosed transactions from which they had benefited. Meanwhile, TV Azteca sued independent TV CNI Canal 40 for having accepted a loan from the Mexican unit of General Electric, which had violated Mexican laws that barred foreigners from running local media. Telesur, a 24-hour Spanish-language satellite station based in Caracas, was inaugurated by Venezuela’s Pres. Hugo Chávez. The state-run regional TV station was receiving assistance from Cuba and Brazil state TV networks and from the governments of Argentina and Uruguay.

The European Commission cleared the joint venture by DirecTV and SkyTerra Communications (an affiliate of equity firm Apollo Group) to buy DirecTV unit Hughes Network Systems. In other sales-and-acquisitions news, private equity firms Permira and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. bought Luxembourg-based SBS Broadcasting under new CEO Mathias Döpfner,, German publisher Axel Springer purchased a majority in ProSiebenSat. 1 Media; and Russia’s last independent network station, REN TV, was sold to state-controlled Evrofinans Bank. Japan’s conservative broadcast industry was rocked by the takeover bid made by the Internet firm Livedoor Co. for Fuji Television Network Inc. A $1.6 billion deal ended the feud. Hong Kong broadcaster Television Broadcasts Ltd. bought the remaining 30% stake that it did not own in Taiwan broadcast firm Liann Yee Production Co., and Star TV, a satellite and cable operator in Hong Kong, bought 20% of the Indonesian national network ANTV, which was owned by the family of the chief economy minister, Aburizal Bakrie.

Early in the year China tightened controls on TV ventures by foreign companies, an action that was viewed unfavourably by several media chiefs. Time Warner’s Dick Parsons declared an unwillingness to compromise the integrity of its news broadcasting in response to criticism by Chinese officials even if the decision affected business prospects, and the Walt Disney Co.’s Robert Iger intended to postpone building a Disneyland on mainland China until he was assured of having permission to broadcast on Chinese TV. Rupert Murdoch stated that News Corp., which was under investigation for having used unauthorized local Chinese cable networks, had hit “a brick wall” in China.

Marking the 25th anniversary of CNN, the first 24-hour news network in the U.S., founder Ted Turner remarked that the network was started as an “adventure.” Ten years after the network was launched, its coverage of the 1991 Gulf War turned CNN into a household name.

Programming

By late 2005, within an 11-month period, all four of the men who had dominated American television news since the early 1980s had vacated their posts, and their bosses were left trying not only to replace them but to determine what kind of program a 21st-century network newscast ought to be. First to leave was NBC’s Tom Brokaw. He retired in December 2004, when he handed over the reins to Brian Williams in a long and carefully planned succession. CBS’s Dan Rather left less of his own volition. His departure in March came as a direct result of a bungled report he did for a 60 Minutes Wednesday telecast the previous year. The report had used what turned out to be unverified documents to try to raise questions about U.S. Pres. George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard as a young man. ABC’s Peter Jennings, who might have been in position to gain viewers from his departing rivals, instead suddenly left the air in early April with the announcement that he was fighting lung cancer. Jennings, known for his strong reporting in the field and calm erudition from the anchor desk, died August 7, at age 67. Then, in November, ABC Nightline anchor Ted Koppel kept a promise he had made earlier in the year to step away from the program because of disagreement with ABC management over the show’s mission and format. Nightline had taken its nightly place on the ABC schedule in 1980, when it was created to provide coverage of the taking of American hostages in Iran. Brokaw had been network anchor since 1983, Rather since 1981, and Jennings since 1983. Filing occasional reports, Brokaw and Rather remained affiliated with their respective networks.

The big guns were gone, and in a sign of confusion or uncertainty, ABC and CBS did not immediately chose successors for their nightly news anchors. ABC employed morning-show host Charles Gibson and correspondent Elizabeth Vargas as temporary replacements for Jennings and only in December did it name Vargas and correspondent Bob Woodruff as his successors. CBS used veteran Washington, D.C., correspondent Bob Schieffer as its temporary anchor and by the end of the year had not selected anyone to succeed Rather. CBS network chief Leslie Moonves openly longed for a more contemporary kind of news program, and he replaced news-division president Andrew Heyward with Sean McManus, who had headed CBS Sports but had not put in time at the network’s fabled news operation. (NBC also fired its news chief, Neil Shapiro, primarily over ratings trouble at the network’s top-rated Today morning show.) ABC’s decision to replace Koppel with three anchors—Martin Bashir, Cynthia McFadden, and Terry Moran—signaled a turn away from Nightline’s reliable one-story format toward a look similar to that of other TV newsmagazines. British journalist Bashir was best known in the U.S. for having interviewed pop star Michael Jackson in the documentary that was the impetus for Jackson’s latest round of legal woes.

Despite the changes and uncertainty, network newscasts continued to draw more than 20 million viewers nightly. The numbers were a far cry from those of the 1970s and ’80s but still well ahead of the combined audience for cable news channels on any given night. Indeed, the Fox network talked of launching a nightly network newscast on its broadcast stations by spinning off the work of its top-rated cable operation, Fox News Channel. Longtime cable king CNN took steps to try to reclaim viewers after Fox supplanted it in the ratings, owing to its more opinionated brand of news delivery. CNN in late 2004 installed former CBS News executive Jonathan Klein as president of its U.S. operation. Among other steps, Klein replaced anchor Aaron Brown with Anderson Cooper.

In prime time the annual Emmy Awards honoured one old favourite and one newcomer to American television. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave its outstanding comedy series honour to Everybody Loves Raymond, the venerable CBS family series that had gone off the air in May. Top drama series was ABC’s first-year mystery Lost, about the survivors of a plane wreck on a not-deserted-enough tropical island. In another sign of its ascendancy to the top of the topical comedy heap—in critical and popular buzz, if not in overall viewership—The Daily Show with Jon Stewart won two Emmys. Daily Show later spun off a nightly half-hour program called The Colbert Report, which was adored by critics for the manner in which former Daily correspondent Stephen Colbert sent up the bluster of top-rated cable-news talker Bill O’Reilly. In a sign of its popular and critical resurgence, the recently moribund ABC network finished with 16 Emmys overall, first among broadcast networks. Its comeback was fueled not only by Lost but also by the runaway popularity of another first-year series, the suburban caricature Desperate Housewives. Part comedy and part murder mystery, the show captured the American imagination instantly in a manner few series had done in recent times. The Emmy Awards were also notable for late-night host David Letterman’s tribute to the dean of his genre, Johnny Carson, who died January 23, almost 13 years after he had retired as host of The Tonight Show.

While ABC made the biggest ratings gains, CBS won the overall battle for most viewers, and Fox just barely won the lead among the advertiser-coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic. The big loser of the season—in a trend continued into the new fall season—was NBC, which suffered from losing the ratings powerhouse Friends and from its inability to develop new hit shows. NBC finished the season fourth both among the 18-to-49 group and in total viewers, a giant comedown for a network that had been the most successful through the late 1990s and into the 2000s.

On the business front, turmoil was the order of the day as television began a transition toward the likely day when much of what it did would also be offered on the Internet. ABC, in a deal with Apple Computer, made episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives available for purchase and downloading via Apple’s iTunes media service. Each episode would become available the day after it aired and cost $1.99. NBC began video streaming its Nightly News free of charge over its Web news site MSNBC.com and later joined ABC in offering shows through iTunes. Respected trade journal Television Business Report reported that many mainstream media channels were going online and that arrangements for video-on-demand content were commonplace. In response to the declining television advertising market, product placement—the insertion of sponsors’ products inside TV series, rather than just in ads aired during ad breaks—was on the rise and was predicted to increase greatly. In September, for example, CBS reportedly added a Chevrolet Impala logo into five of its shows through digital methods. Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, late in the year The Wall Street Journal reported that ad inventory on the front pages of the leading Web portal sites AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN was sold out.

In programming relating to children, the Walt Disney Co. asked the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to review rules that limited the use of interactive ads that mentioned the names of Web sites that kids could visit. Viacom’s Nickelodeon, the most widely distributed children’s TV network, also opposed the restrictions. PBS Kids Sprout began as the first national 24-hour channel aimed at American toddlers, and Nickelodeon launched seven international services. Arabic satellite TV broadcaster al-Jazeera launched Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel to teach Arab children and adolescents aged 3 to 15 such values as open-mindedness and tolerance.

The continuing worldwide coverage of the aftermath of the Dec. 26, 2004, South Asian tsunami was eclipsed by the April 2 death of Pope John Paul II. The global scale of the media coverage of the pope’s death was unprecedented; ABC News.com reported that it was generating 35,000 stories a day. In their media coverage Arabic broadcasters al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya both cited the pope’s support of Muslim and Arab causes.

The Hindi-language quiz show Kaun banega crorepati (“Who Will Be a Ten-Millionaire”), which offered a prize of 20 million rupees ($450,000), was closely followed by 11.7 million Indians. Meanwhile, the Indian government banned the adult satellite channel Free X-TV for having shown programs that violated good taste and morality. In other controversial programming, Dutch TV presenter Filemon Wesselink was shown taking drugs during the show Spuiten & Slikken. Big Brother in the Netherlands featured a pregnant woman who during the series gave birth to a baby that she kept with her in the house in which the series was taking place. In its first week the Filipino version of the series was suspended and given a stern warning by the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board of the Philippines for showing what it called intimate scenes that included bathing and bodypainting. Producers of the series in Germany had a village built specifically for the program, a move that imitated the movie The Truman Show, but the series had poor ratings and was to end in early 2006, a year after it began.

Technology

Countries began imposing deadlines on media organizations to switch from analog to digital broadcasting even as the Internet and mobile telephone became new venues for TV programming. Free digital TV started to spread in Britain, Sweden, Italy, Germany, and France. Conventional broadcasters saw digital terrestrial TV as a means to reach new audiences and sell more ads, and pay-TV providers competed with special offers and expanded services.

Internet-based TV typically came along with personal computers that had built-in TV capabilities and a broadband connection. POV magazine founder Drew Massey financed ManiaTV, an Internet company that on a 24-hour basis served up film clips, music videos, and chatter from “cyberjockeys” (CJs) to college students and 20-somethings. Yahoo! launched a made-for-the-Web program called Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone (an audio-video-photo-blog-chat room run by Sites), Google offered on-demand stream video of the premiere of Chris Rock’s new TV comedy Everybody Hates Chris, and Viacom’s Nickelodeon created TurboNick, a free Internet-based 24-hour access to its programs.

As part of a growing role of the Internet in marketing, cosmetics maker Coty Inc. launched its new fragrance, Lovely, on Vogue magazine’s Web site, Style.com. Featuring actress Sarah Jessica Parker, the online commercial appeared before the TV airing of the same ad.

The cellular (mobile) phone became the latest venue for TV programming. SmartVideo Technologies and V Cast started the year with live and prerecorded TV programs sent to American cell phones equipped with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system. Australian telephone subscribers were introduced to cell-phone video by Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone via the Hutchison 3 network. Germany’s Vodafone D2 was one of the first European operators to offer cell-phone TV service with shows, sports, news, and movies. Norway’s state broadcaster NRK used a cross-country ski marathon in Sweden for testing the transmission from a camera-equipped cell phone to Norwegian TV watchers. French mobile telecommunications operators Orange and Bouygues Telecom began testing the Digital Video Broadcast Handheld (DVB-H) service, which enabled subscribers to watch broadcast TV on a cell phone. Nokia, the world’s largest cell-phone manufacturer, launched a pilot project with Finnish Broadcasting Company and commercial TV channels as well as with mobile service providers TeliaSonera and Elisa.

By the last quarter of 2005, Apple Computer had introduced the video iPod, which was capable of playing short movies, music videos, and ABC or Disney TV shows. Satellite broadcaster EchoStar released PocketDISH, a portable personal video recorder with a hard drive for recording programs and a screen for watching what had been recorded.

Yet a different type of broadcasting venue was being pursued by Sirius Satellite Radio and auto-parts-maker Delphi, which separately unveiled more programming choices for their in-vehicle backseat video displays. Sirius and Microsoft were to develop a video companion to the satellite radio service, and Delphi and Comcast were to create an in-vehicle system that would enable owners to transfer selected video programming to their cars. Although prohibitively expensive and questioned by transportation safety advocates, satellite TV in cars was popular in 2005 as an accessory in SUVs, recreational vehicles, and pickup trucks.

Radio

A new audio genre, called podcasting, came into vogue in 2005. Named after the iPod portable media player but not restricted to it, podcasting was essentially a system for posting a file with audio content onto the World Wide Web and for providing an automatic online notification to the computer of a subscriber to download the file. Subscribers could then copy the downloaded file to a portable media player and play the program whenever and wherever they wanted. The podcaster could be anyone from an amateur husband-and-wife team in Wisconsin to NBC’s top-rated morning Today show, which launched its own podcast during the year. Podcasting took off about midyear when Apple Computer’s popular iTunes online store added tens of thousands of podcasts to its offerings. The Pew Internet and the American Life Project estimated in April that six million Americans listened to podcasts, but a New York Times story in August asked, “Podcasts: All the Rage or About to Fizzle?” One expert quoted in the article estimated that in 2010 some 57 million people would be using podcasts, but another, more pessimistic, expert said that the number would be 30 million. Either way, it was a large audience, and traditional radio executives in 2005 debated how much impact podcasting would have on their industry.

The New York City “shock jock” Howard Stern, meanwhile, spent much of his last year on what was being labeled “terrestrial” (as opposed to satellite-based) radio running down that medium, a situation that caused much tension with his employers at Infinity Broadcasting. He signed a five-year, $500 million contract with Sirius. Sirius and rival XM were the two players in the emerging field of subscription-based satellite radio. At the end of the year, Sirius was ramping up its campaign to convert Stern’s imminent arrival into new subscribers and new buyers for the proprietary receivers necessary for the services. With about five million subscribers, XM had more than double the number of Sirius subscribers, and executives were predicting continued rapid growth. Kagan Research, a leading media analyst, predicted that the total number of subscribers would grow to 46 million by 2014.

To replace Stern, the Infinity conglomerate came up with two new morning shows, an East Coast effort fronted by David Lee Roth (former lead singer for the rock band Van Halen) and a West Coast show headed by Adam Carolla, a comic who also had his own comedy talk show on Comedy Central and cohosted Comedy Central’s The Man Show. Infinity also signed magician Penn Jillette to head a one-hour daily syndicated show. Leslie Moonves, the CBS/Viacom executive who oversaw Infinity operations, said that not all the new shows would succeed but that losing Stern would not be as painful as it seemed because the profit margins on his high salary were thin. A number of stations that were losing Stern began to market themselves as “free radio” to emphasize that there would be a cost for those who followed Stern to satellite. The radio advertising market, which was the basis of free radio, remained soft throughout 2005, however, and toward the end of the year, Wall Street analysts were predicting that little would change in 2006.

In Nepal in February, King Gyanendra declared a state of emergency and imposed a media law that barred FM radio stations from broadcasting news and criticism of the king and the royal family. BBC Nepal news service was stopped, and all community radio stations were locked shut.

Channel Africa, the international radio service of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, formed a partnership with the Southern African Broadcasting Association. Channel Africa took over production of a weekly magazine program named SADC Calling, which discussed regional activities and developments on such issues as HIV and AIDS.

BBC announced that to launch its Arabic TV service, it was ceasing radio services in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, and Thai. The language services would be continued online. BBC began operating an Arabic radio service in 1938.

Palestinian radio station Voice of Love and Peace (VOLP) planned to sue Radio Sawa, the U.S. government’s Arabic network, for using 94.2 FM. Assigned to VOLP since 1996, the frequency was reassigned by the Palestinian Ministry of Information, which went to court to stop VOLP from continuing to broadcast. The Ram Allah Magistrates Court granted an injunction on the ministry’s order, but Radio Sawa continued broadcasting.